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@secularmerlin
As I understand it, a theist can use scripture to validate their subjective opinion as conforming to objective truth. An atheist has no way to validate their opinion as anything more than an opinion.
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@MagicAintReal
I am not necessarily opposed to the sun being a god, but it complicates the definition of an atheist! We do owe our existence to the sun and it certainly has the power to destroy us. If worshipping and praising the sun had any effect on it I'd worship and praise it because I don't want it to go out! But that isn't how the sun works - the sun runs on atomic fusion, not the prayers of acolytes and the sun doesn't are about the sex of who I sleep with.
The sun is a very good god - it gives without demanding anything from us. But it's not the 'sort of god' atheists are against. It is those gods that are supposed to have some sort of consciousness atheist can't accept.
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@ethang5
I reckon I'm fairly careful about using the word 'God'. It's inconvenient that in English we have 'god' and 'God', especially because occasionally (such as starting a sentence) we have to write 'God' when 'god' would have been better!
I like to see a checklist of the attributes something has to have to be a god. For example, most mythological entities that have been dubbed 'gods' didn't create the universe, so perhaps an entity that conscioously and deliberately created the universe would certainly be a god,not creating a universe doesn't disqualify one!
I am an atheist, but that doesn't mean I have to deny the existence of something just because someone calls it a god. If the sun really is MAR's god as he claims then I don't deny the sun exists - but I do dispute that the sun is an actual god! I think a 'proper god' has to be more than a physical process operating accoding to physcal laws (known or unknown) - a proper god has to manifest something like conscious thought and awareness.
By that I mean that as an atheist I don't think there is conscious, aware entity pulling the strings to bring about some end or object. Something must have happened to start the universe - I just don't know what it was! Being an atheist I am betting that whatever did start up the universe was not something conscious, or thinking or plan-forming. I don't think the universe came from nothing - I belive it came from something, but that something was 'just physics' - it wasn't any sort of conscious or thinking agent.
'Capital G God' is a particular instance of all the gods people have imagined over the millennia. I often write 'YHWH' in an attempt ot avoid the ambiguity of the word 'God' which has the dual meaning of 'generic god' and the particular god of Christianity.
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@disgusted
I'd say this was a purely internal spat between theists intent on spliting the finest of hairs, like Star Trek fans arguing about how "warp drive" works. I'd leave them to it.
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@disgusted
He wrote fairy tales as well!
Animal Farm isn't really a fairy story...
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@ethang5
So? Well, I had the impression you prefered to quote conservatives likeThatcher and Churchill. You're not noted as a big fan of left-wing intellectuals.
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@MagicAintReal
Well, I'm an atheist but I don't deny the sun exists!
I am sure the sun exists, but I am also sure it doesn't hear or answer prayers for instance.
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Theists often give the impression that they think atheists have no moral compass. That follows if morality is from god, but it's obviously not true that atheists are all selfish monsters, a fact which confuses those same theists so they try to ignore it!
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It's not my area, but I would guess that psychopaths are perfectly aware what they do is wrong.... they just don't care that it's wrong!
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@Goldtop
They are not encouraged to. They are taught man is inherently evil.
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No, not a thread about race!
How do I identify a tomato as being a red thing? It's certainly not a conscious process - tomatoes just look red! I have a 'colour sense' that tells me what colour objects are.
But the colour I see - that vivid, glowy sensation we learn to call the colour red - isn't a property of the tomato. The tomato is giving out billions of sub-atomic photons which have certain wavelengths and energies but they are not coloured red!
The colour I perceive bears a relation to the wavelengths of the photons, but wavelength and colour are only related - they are not the same thing. Someone with anomalous colour vision may well have a very diferent perception of a tomato from me, but we would agree on the wavelenghts of the photons involved - for that reason we often say colour is 'subjective' and wavelength is 'objective'.
So lets replace the tomato with a murder. I perceive it as immoral using my 'moral sense', and that happens as automatically and unthinkingly as when I perceived the tomato as being red. But - following the analogy - the murder is not objectively immoral just as the tomato was not objectively red.
But I perceived the tomato as red because its photons had certain objective qualities (eg more longer wavelength photons than short ones) - it wasn't completely arbitrary. Similarly there are objective aspects to a murder that - in an unconscious way - cause me to percieve a murder as something immoral.
I think its clear that just as people can be colour blind, people (such as psychopaths) have a faulty moral sense.
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@Tradesecret
Death, I think proves evolution false. Death is the antithesis to life. Evolution is about life. So why die? Why not live forever?
Death occurs because living things are essentially mechanisms and mechanisms eventually wear out and break down. Living things are mechines that make copies of themselves, which they do with high but not perfect accuracy. Those variants that are good self-copiers thrive, those that do not copy themselves well soon disappear. Note that 'thrive' applies to the variant form, not any individual. A variant that copied itself rapidly in short time and dies young is often more successful than a variant that may or may not copy itself before its inevitable demise.
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@ethang5
Ethang5:People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.— George Orwell
GO was a life-long socialist.
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@Castin
And I would hesitate to say "reality is minus god" because that brushes close to an assertion of knowledge, which I of course avoid like a burning bag of dog poop.
Well, I do know god doesn't exist! What would you say about
reality - santa claus = hopelessness?
Surely you don't avoid asserting santa claus doesn't exist?
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@disgusted
They actually don't allow themselves to get it, their fear of death is so overwhelming that they have almost convinced themselves that it won't happen.
I disagree. I don't think theists are simply scared of dying; I think it far more to with life appearing to be meaningless and pointless. Atheism can seem nihilistic - no matter what,you end up dead and have no stake in the future after that.
I have no doubt that is how things are - but there's no denying it really sucks. Of course atheists do find meaning and purpose in such things are their work, their family and 'good works', but atheists have to find meaning in life within themselves; it isn't given from outside.
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@MagicAintReal
Nice one! The sun does fulfil at least some of the function expected of a god, but perhaps not enough of them to be a proper god! I'm thinking that the sun doesn't actually respond to prayers or reward good deeds and punish bad ones for instance.
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@Stronn
I don't think your post answered Grug's question '"where did the information for a chicken come from?".
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PGA wrote:Morality to an atheist worldview is a relative thing. It is based on preference and behaviorism. You can't get an ought from an is, a prescriptive from a descriptive. You can describe what you like (subjectivism/behaviorism) but that doesn't make it good, and the problem with relativism is that no society or culture can be any better than any other. If you hold a materialistic worldview then truth and values are measured through the five senses. How can you measure goodness through those senses (the descriptive)? Values can't be measured by the same tokenRepugnant Hitler's Germany is no more wrong than Kim Jong-un's North Korea or Trump's USA.
My guess is that given this list
Genocide
Donating to charity
Cruelty to animals
Being polite
etc
there would be little differerence btween how an atheist or a theist would rank them for their 'moral value'.
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@Castin
Are you really saying that "Reality minus god equals hopelessness" is "A concise and accurate equation for a ubiquitous human cognitive phenomenon."?Reality is 'minus god', but I don't see things as being 'hopeless' on that account. Things are as hopeless or hopeful as we make them.Yes. What is your issue exactly.
The first one is that 'reality minus god' is just 'reality' so the equation becomes 'reality equals hopelessness', which is a little pessimistic for my taste!
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@Stronn
You left out a crucial defining characteristic of language. Language communicates information from one mind to another. That is not what DNA does, therefore it is not a language.The fact that particular sequences of DNA produce particular results does not mean those sequences have "meaning" in the same way words have meaning. Claiming such is a fallacy of equivocation. It is akin to saying that atmospheric conditions have meaning because particular conditions produce particular results.
I don't think that's right. The information in a chicken genome comes about from chance. Of course getting the DNA sequence of a chicken by pure random chance would take longer than than the life-time of the universe, which is where natural selection gets into the picture. Natural selection is why evolution resembles a purposeful process rather than a random walk.
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@Stephen
That's right. I believe Jesus was tried under Roman law by Romans and sentenced to a Roman execution for crimes against the State of ROME!!.
That isn't in dispute! But the gospels imply that the insurrection charge was only a fudge to make the execution legal.
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The Jacob/Joseph story is set a few generations before Moses, and they are characters in a legend not real people! But we can ask what would
proto-Hebrews of that time may have believed.
The YHWHist priests of the Jews exiled in Babylon who wrote the bible wanted their people to believe that the Hebrews were essentially monotheistic followers of YHWH from the beginning, but it is now generally accepted that the Hebrews believed in a large pantheon of gods, as did most peoples of the ancient middle east. It was usual for a tribe or city to adopt one god of the pantheon as their 'patron god' - such as Marduk of the Babylonians and YHWH of the Hebrew.
Over time - under the influence of their YHWHist priesthood - the Hebrew religion changed from thinking of YHWH as being one god amongst many gods to being the only true god with all the other 'foreign' gods now false and blasphemous.
Clearly a polytheistic religion need names to distinguish the multple gods but a monoetheism doesn't. In Judaism a number of superstitions and taboos also grew up around the 'holy name' and various euphemisms, titles and circumlocutions were used further complicating giving a simple answer to the seemingly simple quesion 'Who as Joseph's god'?
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@Castin
Are you really saying that "Reality minus god equals hopelessness" is "A concise and accurate equation for a ubiquitous human cognitive phenomenon."?
Reality is 'minus god', but I don't see things as being 'hopeless' on that account. Things are as hopeless or hopeful as we make them.
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Do you have a problem with including the text along with the ch+v numbers? It's a pain having to open up blble sites and type/copy multiple verse numbers and frankly, I can't be bothered when its not clear what point you are (presumably) working up to.
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It is not explicitly stated.
I wonder where this is going..!
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Believers are annoyingly resistant to the idea that all those 'amazing prophesies fulfilled by Jesus' aren't so amazing when you realise the NT writers could read.
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I think it interesting on many levels that something 'everybody knows' (such as Jesus was born in Bethlehem) is almost certainly false.
I am a bit surprised no one has yet suggested that the reason Jesus cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is that he did believe himself to be the son of God and couldn't understand why it was happening to him!
But there are many points in the gospel story that allude to the OT. Their purpose is to forge a connection between Jesus and the Judaic Messianic tradition. Those allusions are beloved by 'prophesy hounds' but of course they are not 'prophesies' at all. In this case the reference is to Psalm 22 which begins
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?"
Of course it is possible that Jesus did quote Ps22 on the cross - he would certainly have been familiar with the Psalms. Or - also possible - is that Mark (who also knew his hebrew scriptures) made up that detail because it seemed a nice addition to the picture, and the other evangelists copied it.
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Let me be clear what fence I am sitting on! As an atheist I don't bother with the miraculous or magical elements of Bible stories - they can be junked straight away. So in regard to something like the nativity I'm not bothered with the virgin birth nonsense, but it is interesting whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem for instance,
After many years I have concluded that almost none of the Gospel story is based on actuality. Now my main interest is not whether this or that passage is true (it almost certainly isn't true) but on why the writers set it down.
Unlike you - apparently - i don't think there are enough hard facts in the text to pin down 'what really happened'. It's easy enough to show that the text can't be true, but that isn't the same as being able to construct an alternative narrative that is true.
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@Stephen
As you (probably!) know I don't really like speculating about 'what really happened' because without a time machine we will never know, but I don't deny its fun to speculate!
One fact is that Christianity did not die when Christ died as mght be expected when the leader of a charismatic sect is removed. Instread of folding, the early Christians went for broke and explained His death as being part of God's plan from the beginning and the lack of any body or tomb as due to His resurrection after days, the Gospels reflectin the revised legend.
If so, all one can say is.... it worked!
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@Mopac
But not, apparently, any of the NT.The Jewish people took history very seriously, and still do, because it is believed that God is revealed through it.
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@PGA2.0
So is torturing little children neither right nor wrong? EVERYONE, Mdh2000 doesn't know that torturing little children for fun is WRONG - hide your children and don't let him babysit them.Is that how you want to live your life? Do you really want me to push your moral button and show that you do believe that morality exists, that there are rights and wrongs and they are absolute??? If you can't distinguish between rape or torturing a child, and for fun, as wrong everywhere and in every situation I think you need to see a psychiatrist. I think that anyone who can't determine that is morally repugnant.
The problem is that all you have done is point out that people make moral judgements, not that morality exists. If you want an analogy,consider colour. We judge the colour of objects and even largely agree on the colour of objects, but colour has no objective existence.
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@secularmerlin
An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
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I'd say it was pretty obvious that when the Hebrew scribes set out to preserve their oral traditions in writing they tried to combine two slightly diferent versions of their creation myth into one. Presumably there were meetings of an 'editorial committee', the minutes of which are now sadly lost!
My guess is that originally genesis began with what is now chapter 2 and gen 1 was pre-pended because it was more dramatic!
Many scholars date gen 2-3 as earlier (yahwist source)than gen 1 (P source).
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@ethang5
If you think none of the story is true, then a debate about a sub plot within the story is not for you. Go to the politics board.
If you review the Pilate thread I think Stephen mixed up the levels. For example I wrote
F1: The only indisputable fact is that the gospellers wrote that Jesus was cruficied by the Romans - with some reluctance - at the behest of the Jewish priests.
Stephen replied:
the other indisputable fact is that (F2): BARRABAS was on a charge of "insurrection"
But F2 is not an 'indisputable fact' - it is a detail within a story and may or may not be true; that is not the definition of a fact! But F1 is a proper fact because even if Pilate's trial never happened it is still true that "the gospellers wrote that Jesus was cruficied...etc'.
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@ethang5
in the movie "Taken", when the father gets to the house where his daughter was kidnapped, the kidnapped scene is replayed, this time with additional shots of his daughter being dragged from under the bed. These genuises would insist that 2 daughters were kidnapped and it was a contradiction as the hero has only one daughter.I can see the boneheaded questions now.Who is wrong? The story or you? How many daughters were kidnapped?And of course kieths "educated" take, "It is clear that the story teller intended to rehabilitate Paris as a den of thieves, taking time out to praise the city's electric grid in the middle of a gruesome torture scene!"What does one do with such.......scholarship?
Well, how many daughters were really kidnapped? None, because it's a made-up story so no actual daughters were actually kidnapped.
In the thread about the trial of Jesus you are alluding to I'd say things got very confused because of the mixing up the levels of reality and narrative. I haven't seen the movie yet, but when I do I will be interested to see if I am tempted to say what you pre-quoted me! But it will be true that the story teller will have very different motivations from those of his characters, n'est-ce pas?
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IMO, not everything. There is a physical universe of mindless matter and forces that predate consciousness. However many things do depend on consciousness, such meaning, mattering and values.
If a star goes nova in a universe devoid of consciousness it 'doesn't matter' - it is neither good or bad. But if a nova takes out a civilisation with all its art, history and culture that is a tragedy.
So I don't agree that everything derives from consciousness - but perhaps everything that matters does.
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@bsh1
OMG. I feel like I have answered this question 20 times...probably because I have...You wouldn't know that, though. The answer is you cannot use the n-word but you can debate "that Black Americans have lower average IQs than white Americans and at least a few of those IQ points can be attributed to genetics."
That's fine, but it would probably be the other way around if I was moderator. IMO using 'the n-word' doesn't automatically mean one is a racist and trying to hide a racist agenda behind euphemisms and faux-science should be stamped on -but that is only how I would (try to) do things. I think a moderator has every right - even duty - to operate as they see fit. D'art is a privately owned and paid for - it's not a democracy. C'est la vie.
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@janesix
I would say consciousness arose as a mechanism to modify an entity's responses to be appropriate to external conditions. Strictly speaking consciousness is not required to do that - a system that invokes a fixed response to a clear external cue would be a great improvement over random behaviour but a system like that would resemble a thermostat rather than consciousness.
I think full-blown consciousness may have had its roots in a crude 'behaviour switching' system, but what people mean by 'consciousness' usually involves the production of an 'intermediate mental model' of the external world which allows for much more flexibility in response by allowing past experience and even future expectation as well as current conditions to be taken into account in deciding what to do.
So I suggests consciousness is a way of matching response to stimulus in an extremely powerful and flexible way. Consciousness works by encoding information about the external word (derived from sense organs) into a 'mental model' of the world, upon which algorithmic operatations can be applied to direct behaviour.
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@drafterman
I have never seen a consciousness without an associated brain, though.
Unless all the people you know have 'see-thru' skulls you are assuming the presence of a brain. Also, the people you know probably have big toes - are you sure that consciousness not reside in big toes?
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@Stephen
The only indisputable fact is that the gospellers wrote that Jesus was cruficied by the Romans.yes they do. the other indisputable fact is that BARRABAS was on a charge of "insurrection" BECAUSE : the gospellers wrote that aslo .
I would say that it is entirely possible that Barabbas never existed and was invented by the gospellers to make a good story. I don't know how anyone can tell if Barabbas was 'real' or not.
It is an indisputable fact that the gospellers say Barabbas was charged with insurrection - but that isn't the same thing as Barabbas being charged with insurrection is a fact.
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Both Of these Jesus' were charged with sedition and both went to the cross for it. FACT
I'm not sure how you are defining 'fact' here! Jesus getting cruficied is an episode in a written tale and at this distance in time there is no way to know if it 'really happened' at all.
The only indisputable fact is that the gospellers wrote that Jesus was cruficied by the Romans - with some reluctance - at the behest of the Jewish priests.
So we can infer that when the gospels were being compiled the early Christian church was more interested in fostering good relations with the Roman world than in its Jewish roots. About the actual events - and people - described we can infer nothing with certainty. The trial by Pilate could be anything from a near vertabatim account to a complete fabrication. I'd guess its nearer the latter because the gospels were not written by uninterested, detached historians but by committed, partisan and passionate Christians. But I don't like to speculate about 'what really happened' because AFAICT there is no way of knowing. All we know it that early Christians wanted to present things as happening that way.
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@Stephen
According to the text, the Priests condemned Jesus for blasphemy but - unable to execute him themselves - took Jesus to Pilate to rubber stamp the execution - the grounds for execution under Roman law is not stated in the text.
In the text, Pilate is reluctant to execute an innocent man, and only does so finally 'under protest'.
It seems that you're proposing Jesus and Barabbas were co-conspirators - I'd say that was 'interesting, but flimsy'!
My position is that I don't know what really happened in Piiate's court, or even if even happened at all. However the relevant verses tell us a lot about the development of early Christianity. I'mnot into theorising about 'what really happened' as such - there's no end to the scenarios that can be invented to fit.
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@Stephen
I find it tricky because i want to seperate 'what really happened' from 'what happens in the gospel story'. So if I am asked 'was jesus charged with inusurrection?' I have to ask if you mean was he so charged 'in real life' or 'does the text say he was charged with insurrection?'.
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@ethang5
The big question is whether it was the Romans or the Jewish priests that wanted Jesus dead. According to the text there is no doubt that it was the priests and the Romans were merely employed as their unwiling executioners. But it is possible that is pure pro-Roman/anti-Jewish 'spin' and it was the Romans who arrested, tried and executed Jesus and the priests had nothing to do with it.
No doubt other theories and scenarios are equally 'possible', and there isn't enough material to decide between them as to 'what really happened'. For that reason I try to avoid speculating about it and stick with the one fact we have - the gospel writers sought to exonerate the Romans and exculpate the Jewish priests, presumably to support the growth of Christianity outside Palestine at the cost of its already waning support within Palestine.
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@Stephen
Not with a charge of insurrection and sedition against Rome. You do agree that this was the charge don’t you?
No. Or sort of!
If official documements ever existed of the 'trial',they may well have specified 'insurrection' rather then 'blasphemy' because i doubt blaspheming YHWH was a crime in Roman law. But I don't see anything in the text that implies Jesus was charged with insurrection. In the phrase
"that had made insurrection with him," I read the pronoun 'him' as referring to Barabas, (not Jesus) and other translations are less unambiguous
But in general terms you are dead right - a little background reading is all it takes to cast considerable doubt on the veracity of the bible,as if tales gods,virgin births, miracles and resurrections was not reason enough!
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@Stephen
In my experience, believers believe what they want to believe!
It is possible Pilate tried every trick he could think of to get Jesus off, or he could have rubber-stamped his execution without a second thought. or even with sadistic relish. We don't know what happened -we only know what MML+J say happened.
Of course for reason for saying 'X happened' is that X really did happen, but IMO there isn't much of that in the Gospels!
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@Stephen
There are two seperate 'wars'. The first isn't biblical and owes its place in popular culture more to Milton than scripture. The devil (or satan) rebelled against god (before the creation of man), for which Satan and his followers were sent to the specially created realm of Hell.
As it is not biblical, there is - AFAIK - no definitive Christian teaching as to the origin of Satan, but in the Islamic traditition Iblis rebels against god by refusing to bow down before god's greatest creation, Adam.
The other war is the war described in Revelation which will occur at the end of days.
Currently the 'war' consists of god and the devil trying to gain individual souls.
Or so it is said - I am not sure all of it is true.
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I'm referring to any part and all of it! The evangelists wrote those passages in the way they wrote them - IMO - to deflect the blame for Jesus' death away from the Romans and onto the Jews. I think it is impossible to know what -if anything - really happened; the only indisputable fact is that the evangelists wrote the text we see on the page. Whether the text is true or false -or how true or how false - is unknowable, but the fact the passages exist implies a desire to exonerate Pilate and blame Jewish priests for Jesus' death and shows how Christianity was mutating from a Judadic sect to a gentile - even an anti-jewish - one.I am not sure to which part or parts you refer.
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